Somehow I missed the "offensive" qualifier on the spell tooltip.


Yes, I'm happy that we're seeing a change in an ability that has been serving two (and since ICC, three) very unrelated purposes. Yes it would be great if they split it into two separate abilities, however IMO, this is a step in the right direction. I think the goal is to have us not worry about mana as long as we have 2/2 Primal Wisdom. Rather than worrying that the sky is falling, we can assume that Blizz will balance and tweak accordingly throughout beta and we will end up with a mana situation that is sustainable. Pushing us towards utilizing SR's damage reduction over everything else lets us use it and not worry that we're going to go OOM 30 seconds later.

I absolutely see that happening. It happens now. Take heroic XT or Festergut for example. In an effort to ease the pressure on healers, it's very common to have your paladins divine protection, rogues feint, DK's AMS (iirc, AMS mitigates aoe damage?), or even have cats go bear form for the predictable aoe portion. None of those abilities, though, have been essential for those classes to use on cooldown in order for them to maintain their rotations/priorities. My point is that, as a class with already very little defensive capabilities in PvE, it's nice to see them moving it towards something we use in emergencies, as opposed to something that's required to use on cooldown.

I agree that the current implementation has great potential combined with spiritwalker's grace, and the new greater healing wave. The new nature of it supports it's use as an emergency tool, or something to help out healers.


With all that said, I think this discussion has started to move towards bickering and I think the mana aspect of SR should be examined more closely when we have the ability to see level 85 content. We don't really know the full design intention of SR, and it's possible that the Devs aren't really sure yet either.

It seems you ignored my intended point entirely as well as taking the quote out of context. Perhaps my extended reasoning muddled my point which was summed up at the end. Pretty much, when a spell has 2 functions, survival and dps contribution, it is always going to be used for the DPS, unless the contribution it makes is so negligible that there is little reason to do so. However if that is the case, then why is the dps contribution function even remaining on the skill at all? There seems little point for it to remain and take up something that could be a full survival ability.

With the ability to reallocate the talents in the tree, and the reduction in nessecary points overall, there seems little need to have to tack on dps contributions to abilities that are intended for survival. If the raid situation dictates that they need said abilities then they'll take them, if not they won't. It is sort of like how Thunderstorm was introduced. It started as purely a PvP talent because it had no applicable use in PvE for realistic boss encounters. However because of its place in the tree, as the 51 point talent, people freaked out. Because they needed the skill in for PvP, but didnt want to give elemental anything else that was new, they "compromised" by tagging on the mana regen function, so that there was some reason for a PvE person to get it.

This is not the case for now, as most classes are not recieving new top tier talents, and so essentially they can discard the need for said compromises and focus an ability towards its intended function, and place it in the tree accordingly while switching other talents around.

Also, the new SR function only applies to offensive spells, so it can't even be used for GHW spam, furthering the likely SG offensive use it will likely see if this iteration remains.

Taowth, your logic is flawed and pointless.

There are many situations where mana can become a concern without it being designed into the class that way. Mana burn, heavy totem usage, AoEing, throwing out heals there are a lot of reasons why a shaman could end up running low on mana unexpectedly. With the new SR you should get to maintain your normal rotation and drop your normal complement of totems for basically no mana costs while regaining an even more positive mana flow through our normal expected regen mechanics.

There is nothing wrong with a spell having both offensive and defensive functions. That is interesting game play where you have to make choices and the choices can have consequences. If a spell has two functions, survival and dps, and is always used solely for the dps, as you suggest, then the user is a friggin retard who will die significantly more then one who utilizes the ability more optimally. Also dead shaman do no dps so survival contributions equal dps contributions anyway.

Primal wisdom is a positive mana flow under our expected single target priority list while in constant melee. From less then 1000 mana it took me 50 seconds to fill up to full while doing a full single target priority list with water shield and mana spring totem in place. With lightning shield, no mana spring, only windfury totem in place and just using stormstrike and lava lash it took me 33 seconds of constant melee to fill back up to full.

Throwing out chain heals and even greater healing waves off 5 stacks of maelstrom weapon shouldn't be much of a problem provided it isn't constant. Dropping multiple sets of totems could become a problem, but that seems to be one of the purposes of SR. Although can't test SR too much at the moment since the mana reduction is only affecting magma and searing and only when cast separately. If cast as part of a Call then there is no reduction at all.

During those 15 seconds you would potentially hit them 20 times with white hits and specials returning roughly 40% of your mana pool. Which is roughly the equivalent of improved stormstrike in the current model except you won't get shut down if your stormstrike misses or is absorbed.

Grounding is cheap, tremor is cheap, earthbind is cheap and you can have water shield returning 10% of your mana pool every 3 seconds when you are taking damage along with a nice bit of passive regen. If you are casting heals on yourself, you are doing it wrong but if you are using maelstrom weapon charges stacked up to 4 or 5 to cast even greater healing wave then you shouldn't really be having mana issues.

The new SR works a lot better in pvp then the current model since the current model you would get nothing back if stun locked or kited during SR and our other regens wouldn't be able to keep up. New model is that the regen can keep up but when you get behind you can pop SR and do all your normal offensive things for basically no mana costs.

All that said I am a little worried about primal wisdom since we aren't getting a true picture of the mana situation on the beta. Any shaman who had shamanistic focus specced before the tree change or when they transferred to the beta is keeping it even though it is no longer a talent. Meaning they may need to either adjust primal wisdom up a bit or incorporate the old shamanistic focus into our specialization or just reduce the mana costs of shocks to compensate when they finally get that fixed.

I don't know about you guys but the new SR + Spiritwalkers Grace screams LB spam to me.

Been busy with a heavy work trip and aftermath, so I couldn't really take the time to write up a coherent reply til now :-)

Flawed logic? Hardly. My logic is based on the fact that they cannot design fights that require everyone to activly pop a defensive dr cd or else they will get 100% guarenteed death. However I was also talking about the general statement of survival and dps on the same active use cd, not specifically only at SR, as the way SR and Shaman's mana was designed, there weren't really consequences for saving it for a survival function for PvE. If shaman's mana restore situation was at a place where popping SR early could lead to significant time at 0% mana while waiting for SR to come up, it never would be used early for the purpose of easing healer burden. My whole point was that they changed it, yet left the dual funciton. The discussion is pointless though, I agree on that, since the topic is pretty much regarding designer intent, which we're not privy to.


I found it odd, why do you compare the regen of Primal Wisdom with 2 scenarios that are completely different? How does the water shield and mana spring regen even compare to the lightning shield and no mana spring regen when you're using completely different testing methods for each? You wanted to compare having regen to not having it, yet you then selectively stopped using spells that burned mana. Were you trying to compare "full" pve mana usage gains to just the passive gains? Or were you trying to show that it indeed takes a long time to regen at 100% contact time using nothing but things that generated melee attacks, and thus only showing net PW gains? That wasn't meant as a jab, I'm actually curious of your intent with the statement.


Now, regarding some of the new stuff from the last couple beta builds since I was last free to browse/comment on them, it is all love hate for me. I loved the idea of Static Shock when it was first introduced, but when the proc rate went live at its dismal amount, it was immediatly not worth using for PvP, especially because we really needed Water Shield for sustainability. The low proc rate wasn't worth gambling going OOM significantly faster on. Now they've boosted Static Shock to less of a passive, and I love its concept. However, at the same time, they've removed our mana overhead by reducing us to base mana, and thus we will likely need Water Shield for mana 100% of the time and cannot effectivly juggle between shields (this could change as beta progresses, but as of now thats the case), and so we can't use it!! The worst part is that it isn't even a choice. We HAVE to use Water Shield. On top of that, it is so expensive to talent into, we can't even just drop a single point in for rare occasional circumstances of full mana bar shield switching.

On that note, i've been thinking about the shield thing since I first saw the talent change. I've always loved the idea of Enhancement being able to talent into the ability to have more than one shield active, after all, the premise of our class is self enhancement through the elements. Would be a great Tier 4 single point tie in from 3/3 static. It would also make Improved Shields a better talent just on the merit that its boost isn't a single thing.

I don't understand the addition of Totemic Reach. Why is this not either just flat out baked into totems, or put onto an already lackluster talent? It is similar to the range increase on Earthen Grasp. No one took the talent at all until the CD reduction was added onto it. While this particular application of totem range applies to all totems and is thus more useful, there aren't really many situations where if I wasn't being lazy in repositioning totems that I actually said "damn, I just ran out of tremor range!", nor were there many PvE situations where relocating totems was difficult (just a hassle). If this talent was meant to ease the whining i've seen on the forums about how other people have 100yd auras, and the like, I frankly don't understand why something like this was put in on a talent, and not only that but a tier 2 talent!

Regardless, things are looking up overall, so hopefully the changes keep trickling in. I'd love to see Totemic Vigor merged into Earthen Power. For what they do, and the nessecary elements of them to just how Enhancment plays, the costs are large. Choice isn't a choice when one of the choices is a nessecity. Its not like the choice between Toughness or Static Shock. I could choose either one, for whatever the playstyle is, and either choice could be lived without. But a choice between any of the Tier 4 talents and Searing Flames just flat out isnt one. All 3 other talents are required for PvP functionality, which essentially blocks out all choice.

My last comments are regarding Toughness. After the numerous iterations i'm curious why its movement slowing reduction effect still exists. We have 2 seperate functions that effectivly eliminate movement slowing functions (Earthen Power and GW not reducing speed below 100%) from being major concerns. This funciton was put on there before the GW change was implemented, and yet it has endured this long in the beta. We have many ways of dealing with slows, it's roots that screw us. The movement slowing reduction doesn't even choss my mind in wanting to choose the talent, so it's effectivly just +stamina to my eyes as is. Anyone else see it this way or is it just me?

To work out what we need for Cataclysm, we should look at the situation of Enhancement PvP in WotLK. From TBC to WotLK, we went from a burst dps class with disruption to a brute-force dps class, which is just terrible without MS. We're so highly dependant on Spirit Wolves, we're like 3-minute arcane mages from Vanillia. We need to work out what would make Enhancement a good PvP spec, not keep them as the terrible one comp purge/lust-bot spec that we are now.

Our ability to put out pressure outside of wolves is laughable. A big part of this is the obscene amount of instant heals/haste rating/haste talents that came in WotLK. Earth Shock/Wind Shear is only a 2s lockout, but it has a low cooldown, meaning it was really useful for constantly harassing healers throughout a match. This was basically our version of MS/Mana Burn/pressure. While long-cooldown, long-lockout interrupts and silences are still useful for creating kill opportunities our piddly 2s lockout means very little at the critical moments. From the Enhancement perspective, it's like every healer turned into the TBC druid except you can't even purge the heals off.

The massive amount of trash buffs hasn't helped the other big we bring to the table; purge. Have you ever tried to purge Sacred Shield off a Paladin? Or HoTs off a Druid with Natural Perfection going? It's horrific.

The final big problem with Enhancement PvP is with wolves. While wolves are up, we actually do good damage and aren't completely useless in arena. But since the duration AND the cooldown are so long, it basically means suck without it since our PvE damage is balanced without it. Reducing their CD, duration and damage would let us use their utility more, without making us such a tunneling brute force idiot spec to play.

I'm not sure how the pressure side of it can be fixed. The genie is out of the bottle with all the new heals/trash buffs that are out. Just giving us a MS effect might help our effectiveness but I would really like something that gives us back part of the uniqueness of our gameplay.

Edit: Not even going to into the retardedness that is Hex and Druids. Mages will feel our pain soon enough.

Heh, it was only just now, when I was updated the first thread that I noticed that the thread has actually been on page 2, where I didn't notice it in my page 1 Opera cache.

Updated the mega post (had to cut some of it, including the frostbranded and soe part cause i stupidly deleted my third placeholder post before updating and ran out of space!), as well as replied to your 2nd post there Panny. Little mega post of its own, but eh, i'm thorough in relating viewpoints.

Saw the new build info on MMO Champ and the one thing that stuck out to me was the stupid Tol Barad trinkets. Why do only casters get the Bandit's Insignia and melee only get this crappy on use function! Though with our active ability damage going up, I might actually not hate on use funciton trinkets anymore. Hmmm, we'll have to see.....

So with the addition of that +50% unleash elements, which part of unleash frostbrand does this effect? The slow or the duration? 75% slow seems pretty nice to me :-)

Wonder if that makes it pretty much down to 0% with another slow applied. Any in beta to test this would be nice.